• Globally, nearly all smartphones and tablets are corporate-liable devices, including most BYOD smartphones. Their purchase price or monthly voice/data services fees of $42 per user on average are paid for, in part or in full, by employers.<br />
• Organisations report plans to buy more Android than iOS corporate tablets in the next 12 months, a warning shot over the bow of iPad current business tablet dominance.<br />
• Microsoft Windows mobile devices barely show on the radar for corporate support and purchase plans. Microsoft and its partners must start addressing businesses and mobile worker needs.<br />
The average replacement cycle for business smartphones has shortened considerably to 1.1 years. RIM, whose smartphones still enjoy solid corporate support, must battle to retain customers who revisit smartphone decisions every year.

“One of the chief drivers for phablets is the amount of time people use their smartphones for web browsing, reading articles and newspapers on the go, or simply navigating their journeys,” says senior analyst Joshua Flood. “The larger screen sizes make a significant difference to the user’s experience when compared to conventional-sized touchscreens between 3.5 to 4 inches.” Additionally, new phablet-styled devices provide an attractive two-in-one device proposition and are beginning to see the competition between these larger smartphone form factors and smaller media tablets (less than seven inches).<p>

Phablets are defined as having a touch screen size between 4.6 to 5.5 inches. Global shipments for phablets will increase by a factor of 10 in 2012 from 2011.

Google's 7-inch Android tablet is real — it's even being passed around inside the Googleplex.<p>

That's what I'm hearing from Googlers who have seen the device. Backing up what's been rumored for months on CNET, Digitimes and other sites, I'm hearing that this device is aimed squarely at Amazon's Kindle Fire (which runs Amazon's tailored version of Android). It's likely to start in the $200 to $250 range, have a higher resolution screen, and perhaps a camera.

Smartphones powered by the Android and iOS mobile operating systems accounted for more than eight out of ten smartphones shipped in the first quarter of 2012 (1Q12). According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, the mobile operating systems held shares of 59.0% and 23.0% respectively of the 152.3 million smartphones shipped in 1Q12. During the first quarter of 2011, the two operating systems held a combined share of 54.4%. The share gains mean that Android and iOS have successfully distanced themselves from previous market leaders Symbian and BlackBerry, as well as Linux and Windows Phone 7/Windows Mobile.

Roughly 50% of all the smartphones sold in the USA in Q1 2012 were iPhones. This is very different to the global picture:<p>

Android is outselling iPhone by more than 2:1 on a global basis. But in the USA, Apple is massively outselling Android. That has obvious implications for where (mainly US-based) developers should be placing their efforts.

And, that leads us to the number one issue cited as a problem: developer support. Developers claim the platform is too troublesome because of device specific variations, but the reality is that it's just that developers don't think they make enough money to justify that work. This could be because of the single listing and therefore single purchase of apps [for both phones and tablets], but it's really just a vicious cycle where developers don't put enough support into the ecosystem, and so the ecosystem doesn't support developers.

Fragmentation matters to the entire Android community: users, developers, OEMs, brands & networks. It's a blessing and a curse.</p><p>

The Blessing. Fragmentation allows users to take their pick from thousands of devices. You can choose from phones with 3D screens, projectors, CDMA, GSM, or even CDMA & GSM. You may not care that Tag Heuer has made an Android phone but at least one person does (and they use OpenSignalMaps). It's a triumph for Android that as a single OS it can target so many markets.</p><p>

The Curse. The proliferation of devices with their associated screen sizes, internal hardware and custom ROMs creates some difficulties. We spend a lot of time making the app presentable (or at less functional) on exotic devices - this is the most common request we get from app users.

<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702304371504577406511931421118-lMyQjAxMTAyMDEwNTExNDUyWj.html">The Wall Street Journal</a> reports that the new strategy will accompany the launch of Android 5.0 - to be known as Jelly Bean, in keeping with Google's sweet tooth for Android code names – and involves several Android vendors. Several devices, including both tablets and unlocked smartphones, will be sold directly through Google's Web site and through some unnamed retail partners.

Thailand reportedly also looked at some of China’s largest tablet manufacturers, such as Lenovo and Huawei, but the pricing per unit was too high for its budget. Conversely, a lower bid from another company was offered but rejected by the government, perhaps due to less specs for the value.</p><p>

The select device model, priced at $81 per unit, is the Scopad SP0712: An 7-inch Android device running the 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system. It’s also got 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal memory, 1.5 GHz single core CPU, and comes in four color options: Red, blue, silver, and gold. Shenzhen Scope will also set 30 help centers around the Southeast Asian country to provide user support specifically for tablets received from the campaign. Not too shabby of specs for tablets for elementary school students.

When playing with the assumptions, it becomes clear that the model is most sensitive to the revenue per device and total devices in use. The profitability is entirely dependent on those figures as variable costs are a percent of sales and fixed costs are limited by talent constraints.</p><p>

For example, if revenues per device drop to $4.50/yr then the operating margin drops to 38%.</p><p>

Now we can calculate some of the more interesting figures. For example:<br />
• Android OEMs receive $0.76 on average per device per year<br />
• Android Operators receive $1.07 on average per device per year (including Play)<br />
• Android Developers, as a group, receive $1.94 per device per year (including Play and AdMob)<br />
• Google receives a contribution of $2.75 per device per year from Android</p><p>

Again, these figures are very sensitive to the revenue per device (currently assumed to be $6.50).

When asked by [Google counsel Christa] Anderson why he nor his team ever attempted to learn about Sun’s patents, [Android chief Andy Rubin] replied there were a “number of reasons,” first citing that virtual machines weren’t new when Sun created the Java virtual machine. He also pointed out that “there are hundreds of millions of patents worldwide.”</p><p>

“It’s not reasonable to go searching through all this paperwork, not for an engineer,” Rubin remarked. “You need to be a trained lawyer for that.”</p><p>

Possibly recalling the blog post by former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, which has become a sticky subject for Oracle, Rubin confirmed that Sun’s reaction to the debut of Android offered “more confidence” that Google wasn’t violating any patents.</p><p>

“Over the period of the development, we felt it just wasn’t necessary anymore to worry about this stuff,” Rubin said.

Based on our current research,  NotCompatible is a new Android trojan that appears to serve as a simple TCP relay / proxy while posing as a system update. This threat does not currently appear to cause any direct harm to a target device, but could potentially be used to gain illicit access to private networks by turning an infected Android device into a proxy. As previously mentioned, this appears to be the first time that compromised websites have been used to distribute malware targeting Android devices.

It's quite clear that Android was being designed to a completely different target before the iPhone was released. What we see here would have fitted in perfectly with the world of Symbian and BlackBerry. This early build of Android is in fact even less capable and mature than the 2004 release of Symbian Series 90 (Hildon), the OS that runs on the Nokia 7700 and 7710 - Nokia's first, and only, pre-iPhone touchscreen smartphones.

The Galaxy S III is... well... it's ugly. There's really no other way to put it. But why? Why is it ugly? I don't mean aesthetically, why is it ugly, I mean, "How did something like this ever make it out of Samsung's design studio?" I'll tell you how, it was never in the design studio. This phone design was born down the hall, in a room where the door sign reads "Samsung Legal."</p><p>
It was designed by lawyers.

So what did we get? The <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/12/2486618/siri-weird-iphone-4s">Siri</a>-imitating S Voice, a quad-core SoC that's already been announced for the <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/15/2951189/meizu-mx-quad-core-available-june-price-cut">Meizu MX</a>, a suite of camera enhancements that rips off HTC's <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/2/2916098/htc-one-s-review">ImageSense</a> wholesale, and a signature animated lock screen that emulates interaction with water, something that's been a live wallpaper option on Android phones since 2010. Oh, and industrial design and build quality that you'll find on any anonymous South Korean MP3 player &mdash; Samsung seems to have tried trickling its design language <i>up</i>, never a good idea.</p>
<p>We're told not to be sheep, yet Samsung itself is just falling in line with the herd. The company seems oblivious to the sense of betrayal this has engendered in the informed consumer. For the first time in its history, Samsung had enough sway with phone buyers to convince them to hold off on the premier option on the market, HTC's <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/5/2927291/htc-one-specs-features-release-date-reviews">One series</a>, in wait for Samsung's riposte. The Galaxy S pedigree was on the line, and if Samsung could live up to it, a bond of trust was going to be its reward. People were ready to start treating Samsung like Apple, giving it the benefit of the doubt both in terms of product timing and the adoption of unfamiliar new features.</p>
<p>Then the talk about wind, water, pebbles, and feng shui home screen organization started.

Samsung has fully unveiled the Galaxy S III here at the London event today, and one of the inclusions to its modified version of Ice Cream Sandwich is an exclusive version of Flipboard. It marks the first time that Flipboard will be making the jump to Android, previously having seen a home on iOS. Samsung say that they have an exclusive window on the app, so it won’t be hitting the Play Store or other handsets until a later date.

Motorola’s mobile device unit accounted for 71 percent of its total sales, marking a boom in its smartphone and tablet business. The company did not disclose how many tablets it sold during the quarter. Boosted by the Droid Razr and the Droid Razr Maxx, which has a larger battery life, the two smartphones practically carried the company through the first few months of the year, just as it did on the previous quarter.</p><p>

Latest comScore figures show Motorola has just shy of 13% of the mobile OEM market share between December and March, though it dropped by 0.5%.

LG is not, as rumoured, ditching Windows Phone 7 in favour of Android it seems with the electronics giant confirming as much to Pocket-lint.</p><p>

"None of it is true. Korea Herald is showing its speculative side again," a spokesman for the company in Korea exclusively told Pocket-lint before adding, "We are still on board with Windows Phone, but right now, we're focusing on Android because that's where the demand is."

Mobile ads pay very poorly. In my case, ads didn’t even come close to delivering similar value as the $4.99 paid-app sale — I was lucky to get even $1 of value out of an Instapaper Free user. What I’ve heard from other developers and other ad networks suggests that this is pretty close to the industry average.</p><p>

I decided to yield the free market to my competitors and discontinue Instapaper Free over a year ago, and my sales have remained healthy. (In fact, they’ve increased, but it’s difficult to know whether that was the cause.)…</p><p>

This definitely isn’t an Android problem: it’s a user problem. Maybe a significantly larger percentage of Android users insist on free apps than iOS users (it certainly seems that way). But both platforms have much larger demand for free apps than paid apps.

Other documents entered as evidence come from an internal July 2010 presentation given by Rubin. They reveal that the company got advertising revenue of just $16.8m from Android handsets in 2009, but by mid-year of 2010 that had grown to $132.1m from ads on the fast-growing handset market – though Apple devices such as the iPhone and iPad using Google's search and maps generated $281m, or more than twice as much in total.

Competitors offering similar secure, encrypted devices are charging $15,000 to $20,000 per device and are using proprietary software and hardware, Palma said.</p><p>

“We are going to drive down towards a lower price point, but … not mass-market price point,” he said referring to iPhones, BlackBerries and other consumer market smartphones.</p><p>

“We believe that there is significant interest in the defense side as well as the intelligence side and in the commercial world as well,” Palma said.

Although there are no reliable stats, China appears to have a big problem when it comes to malicious mobile apps either finding their way onto legitimate sites such as those run by the operators, or dubious third party platforms.</p><p>

Roy Ko, a consultant at the Hong Kong Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center, told The Register that part of the problem lies with Chinese mobile users themselves.</p><p>

“In China people like to crack software and make it available for free but that is dangerous because Google Play at least has some quality control, but on the other sites you get these cracked apps alongside malicious ones,” he argued.</p><p>

The most common end goal for the creators of these malicious apps is either to steal data, or make money out of premium dialler malware, although increasingly hackers are using these infection channels to turn smartphones into botnets, Ko explained.

ROM Manager is an app that makes it easy for Android smartphone and tablet users to install custom ROMs on rooted devices with unlocked bootloaders. You can use the free version of the app to flash ClockworkMod Recovery on your device, reboot into recovery, install ROMs, or manage backups.

This was highlighted by the <a href="http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/03/27/hugely-popular-ios-game-temple-run-is-now-available-for-android/">recent release of Temple Run</a> on the Android platform. A previously (very) successful game on iOS, it was brought over to Android in order to take advantage of the huge number of devices that run the OS. And it has already hit <a href="http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/03/30/temple-run-gets-a-lot-of-google-play-1-million-android-app-downloads-in-3-days/">1 million downloads</a> in just 3 days, good, even for a free app. But very quickly, the developers of the app discovered the pitfalls of fragmentation

Samsung Electronics announced today (March 28th) that GALAXY Note, released in October last year,  has surpassed 5 million sales in just 5 months.
 
Thanks to the fast selling GALAXY Note, Samsung Electronics has gained about two thirds of the South Korean mobile phone market share, making Samsung the leading mobile phone provider in Korea in addition to China, France, Spain and others.

Strictly speaking, analysts say that its 5in size means they'll classify it as a tablet. Note too that these are "sales" to the retail channel - what others call "shipments".

However, it still means that the same two companies dominate in the smartphone and tablet markets. This is one of them. For an example of those struggling further down the tablet market, read on...

As a little kicker on the story, court filings have revealed that the device has produced pre-order numbers that are, shall we say, less than legendary.

It’s not entirely fair, of course, to compare a fragmented and developing ecosystem like Android tablets to the world leader, the iPad. After all, you don’t look at a new local restaurant and say “yeah well, McDonald’s has served billions.” Selling at that volume is by far the exception, not the rule. At the same time, Asus is a big company with lots of ambition in the tablet and mobile computing space, so we can at least hold them to the standard of a large and established company.

So when court filings reveal that pre-orders for this poster child for Android 4 tablets (and it does look great) total a whopping 2,000 units as of a month ago, it’s kind of a letdown. That and 80,000 going to retailers worldwide make the device seem rather minor even in comparison to other Android products like the Nook Color and Kindle Fire.

The supply of smartphones running on Android 4.0 will increase substantially starting the second quarter of 2012, with mid-range to high-end models coming from brand vendors including HTC, Samsung Electronics, and Sony Mobile Communications, while China-based handset makers may launch models based on Qualcomm's 7227a solution and MediaTek's MT6565 platform for the entry-level segment, according to industry sources.

Smartphones running on Android 4.0 account for only 2-3% of all Android phones in use currently, the sources indicated.

It's the GSM Nexus that's under fire today. You see, over on <a href="http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1376856">XDA</a> some GSM Nexus owners have been having problems manually flashing the recently rolled out update to 4.0.1. Unfortunately, there's no problem with the update file. It has to do with custom Samsung installed firmwares.

a new comparison was made ​​by Android Central. The site wanted to know the performance of Google Chrome on Android (currently in beta) from the browser Safari mobile. As shown in the video, the iPhone 4S and Safari are doing pretty good but the Galaxy Nexus wins many times over its competitor.

The <a href="http://androidandme.com/2012/01/devices/asus-memo-370t-could-be-a-kindle-killer-tegra-3-for-250/">ASUS MeMo 370T</a> that was revealed at CES has been scrapped after Google contracted with ASUS to produce their "Nexus tablet". Earlier reports said the device would retail for $249-199, but we are now told the target price is $149-199. The quad-core Tegra 3 version that was previously leaked is no more. Other than the 7in display, no additional information has been provided on the specs.

The platforms that run HTML5 faster are likely to have an advantage in running a whole new wave of applications and games. So Spaceport.io, the cross-platform mobile game development tool maker, ran a study to find out whether iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) is faster than Android at running HTML5 games. Hands-down, iOS won.

Google's approach, which is to say that apps should be screen-size-independent and that it's okay to blow up phone apps to tablet size, is simply wrong. Developers need to take different design approaches on a 4-inch screen and on a 10-inch one. There is no shortcut, no way around this.

The result is that you have a lot of apps on Android tablets—Twitter and Facebook are the most prominent—that function but look ugly and take lousy advantage of the real estate. They aren't grainy like iPhone apps blown up to 2x on an iPad, but they're awkward to use and full of blank space.

We see this problem regularly in the PCMag Labs when we try to do Android tablet app stories. It's easy to create a list of 75 great iPad apps. Building a list of great Android tablet apps is harder. On our last attempt, our software team only found 12.

Where did your dollar go?  We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another - porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc.  I would have preferred spending that time on more content for you, but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn't go through.  We spent thousands on various test hardware.  These are the unsung necessities of offering our apps on Android.  Meanwhile, Android sales amounted to around 5% of our revenue for the year, and continues to shrink.  Needless to say, this ratio is unsustainable.

From a purely economic perspective, I can no longer legitimize spending time on Android apps…

I’ll end with an observation. Last week, several people at my company just spent a lot of time doing video production for a demo of our mobile app. The script noted that the app can be found in Apple’s iTunes App Store and Google’s Android Market. Now we get to redo that work.

But this is more than just sour grapes. Now the demo, for a higher education mobile application, will need to say “to keep in touch with your university courses, classroom discussions, faculty and classmates, and campus news, download our mobile app at Google Play.”

Ice Cream Sandwich is coming to the Samsung Galaxy S2 this month. It may be later than hoped, but it seems the S2 will update to the latest version of Android on 15 March.

That's according to a post on Samsung's official Facebook page in Israel -- which has since been deleted. Fingers crossed, folks...

From Monday, you'll no longer download apps from the Android Market, but instead, from Google Play.

Over the next few days the firm will push out an update to Android handsets that changes the name of the app you were using. This might confuse some, especially as Market updates tend to happen more automatically than most.

Nothing much changes though. The name is to reflect the new multimedia store that sells not only apps, but music, videos and ebooks too. This was something that Android Market did before, with sections for apps, movies and books growing out of the original offering which was solely for apps.

Google is also hoping that this new name, and some minor tweaks, will make people spend more money. That might be true, but we can't see anyone being prepared to cough up £4.49 to rent "The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption".

I spoke at a conference near Cardiff recently and in Q&A, I got The Question. I love getting the question.

What's the question? This: "What's wrong with Android?"

I realised, giving my answer, that I've never written down my objections to Android. Before we get into this, let's understand that I'm primarily talking about "what's wrong with Android from the perspective of someone planning a long-term 1:1 deployment in a school".

I'd like to fill in the picture I began in my recent <a href="http://pxldot.com/post/18281312362/android-measuring-stick">post</a> on Android fragmentation by examining the changes in version distribution of the other major mobile operating system: iOS.

Unfortunately, this was no quite as easy as it was for Android. Unlike Google, Apple does not publish the version distribution of its user base. What we do have, however, is a number of developers who have published the version distribution within their own apps, and if we can collect a large enough sample it may be feasible to use these in lieu of direct vendor-supplied data.

Using 50 data points from different developers, we can indeed build an image of version distribution over time for iOS just as we did for Android. Note that these are bundled into major releases. Grouping these into the major releases reduced noise and also matched the groupings more closely to those I used for the Android post — while it may not be a direct Apples-to-Apples comparison, it is likely the best we can do.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has promised that the firm will simplify the process by which Android phone users agree to share their data.

It follows questions in the US Senate about how much location information is stored by mobile handsets.

Speaking in the UK at a conference on privacy, he also revealed that Google planned to offer web users more control over their online profile.

Mr Schmidt insisted that the company took the matter "very seriously".

We've been tipped by a reliable source today that Google will be using the name "Key Lime Pie" for the version of Android that comes after Jelly Bean.

The screen of the Xperia has the same resolution as the iPhone 4s (330 pixels per square inch)! That’s one of the iPhone’s biggest selling points, and something to this day unmatched by phones like the Samsung Galaxy S2. The Sony’s aluminum body gives it the best build quality of all Android phones. Believe me when I say that this is going to take share of mind.

As Bits reported earlier this week, developers who make applications for Apple iOS devices have access to a person’s entire photo library, as long as that person allows the app to use location data.

It turns out that Google, maker of the Android mobile operating system, takes it one step further. Android apps do not need permission to access a user’s photos, and as long as an app has the right to access the Internet, it can copy those photos to a remote server without any notice, according to developers and mobile security experts. It is not clear whether any apps that are available for Android devices are actually doing this.

The crucial question is whether the billion Android phones will have an effect on the opportunity for new entrants like Windows Phone and future BlackBerry variants as well as Bada and other Linux-based platforms.

The answer is that there will be well over 6bn mobile “connections” by the end of 2013. ITU reports that “By the end of 2010, there will be an estimated 5.3bn mobile cellular subscriptions worldwide, including 940m subscriptions to 3G services. It follows then that if this forecast is correct then by the end of 2013, Android will have about 17% penetration of the connections market.

Vodafone Group Plc, the world’s largest mobile operator, plans to use the Cebit technology trade show in Hanover next month to demonstrate its device-management suite as well as a SIM-card software that authenticates a phone’s user and encrypts data and messages, said Jan Geldmacher, who heads the carrier’s German enterprise unit. The encryption works better on Android devices than on iOS because Apple doesn’t let developers fine- tune the operating system for maximum security, he said.

“The security is a bit reduced if the manufacturer doesn’t let us access the system,” he said in an interview. “When I advise a customer and he wants to use an encryption mechanism from our Secure SIM card, and he asks me which phone he’d recommend, I’d say take an Android device.”

Assuming that Google is firmly planted in reality, what are they actually going to do to meaningfully improve Android’s disappointing tablet sales and lack of much good tablet software?

More importantly, what can Google do?

With the realities of the tablet market (excuse me, “other platforms”), and with the existing Android hardware ecosystem and the software policies that let it get there, I don’t think I have a realistic, practical answer to suggest. I honestly have no idea what Google could meaningfully do about their tablet problems.

"I can't force someone to write a tablet app," he said, adding that developers are "looking at market share and... being frugal." But he said that it was Google's responsibility to evangelize the platform and sounded optimistic about the overall momentum of Android on tablets. "We're now starting to get on the radar, and I'm hoping people decide to put in the muscle and make their apps work great on tablets."

From the perspective of patent law, the question is whether the improvements in question (putting multitouch on a phone, adding a graphical indicator to slide-to-unlock) would have been “obvious” to someone of ordinary skill in the art. But thisis just re-stating the same subjective question in slightly different terms. If you polled a bunch of engineers or patent lawyers, you’d likely get widely varying opinions.

And yet patent law imposes harsh penalties on subsequent innovators who stray outside these extremely fuzzy legal boundaries.

Wondering when Google is going to jump into the tablet fray? It may happen later this year, a DisplaySearch analyst told CNET.

The Google-branded tablet will have a 1280x800 resolution 7-inch display, according to Richard Shim, an analyst with DisplaySearch. Production is slated for April. The initial production run is between 1.5m to 2m units, according to Shim.

It’s clear that Gingerbread has disseminated into the market much more slowly than either of Froyo or Eclair. In fact, it took Gingerbread about 17 weeks longer to reach a version distribution milestone (10%, 20%, 30%) than its two predecessors. While it is too early to fairly judge ICS’s trajectory, it certainly appears to have started at a slower pace than did Gingerbread (more on that later). A seemingly endless string of devices entering the market with Honeycomb and few older devices being upgraded to ICS makes it unlikely that we will see the Android version distribution improve in the near term.

So how can a late entrant like Amazon, with little-to-no hardware DNA, waltz in and knock off a consumer electronics juggernaut like Samsung, a company that also enjoyed strong growth in 2011?  This is where we believe things get interesting.  In short, Amazon’s launch of Kindle Fire had more in common with an Apple-style launch than it did with aligning with the Android system. To date, the Android world has focused on marketing the operating system and the “power” of the devices, with quality of content and the consumer experience subordinated in priority.

Could this happen on Android is a fairly cut-and-dry question. The answer is no, as in, a snowball's chance. No, nien, nyet, non. Why it can't happen on Android still only hints at the bigger problem.

In other words, Google is going to start controlling Android more tightly by stealth: it will sell the best phones, with rapid, regular updates that its erstwhile-partners can’t match. Within a few years, I fully expect Motorola to have overtaken Samsung as the number one Android vendor. And, what’s more, I wouldn’t be surprised if Samsung hadn’t forked Android and ended up producing its own Samsung-only variant, with its own App Store.

Even the most fragmented, forked, customised and mangled ‘Android’ device has an open web browser and data connectivity and can drive mobile use of Google Search. Indeed, saying that an Android device like the Kindle Fire ‘has no Google services’ might be true in one sense but misses the underlying point – the browser itself is by far the most important Google Service on any device.

In a distinct departure from the agreement voiced between Apple, Cisco and Microsoft regarding the need for fair, transparent, understandable and consistent licensing policy for open standards, Google has promised to continue to wage Motorola's increasingly hostile patent wars.

ZTE is now targeting 80 Million handset volume in 2012 – and 100% smartphone volume growth. ZTE Blade became the second-best selling W-CDMA phone in China last summer and is now cruising towards 10 million units sold globally. The ZTE Skate is off to an even faster start. And ZTE is actually behind Huawei in China – these two combined are likely to hit 25% share of China’s handset market by summer. By elbowing out old champs like Motorola and LG in China, Huawei and ZTE are building production scale they can leverage to undercut rivals even more aggressively in the rest of the Asia.

It would not be surprising if Google opts to wind down Motorola’s handset operations sometime over the next two years and Sony bails out entirely.

Some US officials this year are expected to get smartphones capable of handling classified government documents over cellular networks, according to people involved in the project.

The phones will run a modified version of Google's Android software, which is being developed as part of an initiative that spans multiple federal agencies and government contractors, these people said.

Symantec has backtracked from assertions last week that 13 Android apps distributed by Google's Android Market were malicious, and now says that the code in question comes from an aggressive ad network that provides revenue to the smartphone programs.

The issue would require the user to install an application that had been specifically designed to harvest details or was uploaded to the Android Market with the specific aim of collecting information. The impact may have been small in the fact that such an app will not see the reach as a more popular app but the security risk does exist.

If you own one of the affected handsets, you may have already received the fix. If you do not, keep checking the HTC Support site for more information.

ChangeWave asked 254 new Kindle Fire owners a series of questions regarding their overall satisfaction and key likes and dislikes, to gauge their reaction to the new tablet device.

Customer Satisfaction. When asked how satisfied they are with their new tablet device, better than one-in-two Kindle Fire owners (54%) say they are Very Satisfied. Another 38% say they are Somewhat Satisfied.

In previous ChangeWave surveys we've found that the percentage of tablet owners who say they are Very Satisfied with a particular device is highly predictive of future demand for that device. So how does the Amazon tablet rating match up against other tablet devices?

While the 54% Very Satisfied rating for the Kindle Fire is considerably below the 74% rating of the industry leading Apple iPad*, it is higher than the 49% average rating for all of the other tablet devices combined.

I finally had someone explain to me why Android will gain huge marketshare this year in the large-screen tablet wars (aka where iPad is dominant). It took USA’s #1 TV manufacturer, Vizio, to do it. Why didn’t Google have them on stage to show this off a few weeks back at Google IO?

This collection of tips and tricks for Android tablets range from settings to make them run better, to special features that can be unlocked by those who know about them. They work on any tablet running Honeycomb, which is most of them, and many should work on Ice Cream Sandwich, too.

“In short, Pepper Hamilton is accusing its own client of infringement,” Mountain View, California-based Google said in the filing. “Pepper Hamilton should not be allowed to continue alleging infringement against the products and interests of its current client.”

Google, which has used Pepper Hamilton to help it apply for patents related to its Android mobile operating system, accused the law firm of disloyalty and said confidential information it shared creates conflicts of interest in the Digitude case. With so much patent litigation among technology companies there is bound to be some overlap among lawyers, said Scott Daniels, a partner with Westerman Hattori Daniels in Washington.

“Conflicts are hard on law firms,” Daniels said in an interview. “You don’t want to anger your clients.”

What ICS doesn't magically change is the selection and quality of the tablet apps available in the Android Market. I have consistently pointed out the lack of tablet-optimized apps in my Honeycomb tablet reviews, and it looks like it will be a complaint that persists. While there have been some notable additions and there are some decent tablet-optimized apps (News360, Plume, and TapTu come to mind), others like Facebook and Twitter haven't been redesigned to take advantage of the higher resolution screen, making the experience flat-out disappointing.

Most people (and reviewers) seem to believe that the 10.1in screens (measured diagonally) on the Android Tablets are larger than the 9.7in iPad screen – but they are actually 5% smaller than the iPad in terms of the image area of the screen, which is what really counts. This is due to both Aspect Ratio geometry (the screen area decreases as the Aspect Ratio increases) and the Android system bar, which reduces the image area.

The company’s u-turn follows disappointing global results earlier this month when first quarter net profit fell 26% to $365m, its first quarterly decline in earnings for two years as it faced competition from Apple and Samsung’s Galaxy range.

HTC UK chief Phil Roberson (pictured) told Mobile the manufacturer will return to a strategy of launching a limited number of high-spec devices this year, with a focus on second quarter releases. He said: ‘We have to get back to focusing on what made us great – amazing hardware and a great customer experience. We ended 2011 with far more products than we started out with. We tried to do too much."

Because of their long lines on release days, rabid fan base and huge stacks of cash, Apple has the largest target on it’s chest for this type of expose. But Foxconn doesn’t exist solely to produce electronics for Apple. All of the largest Android OEM’s also contract Foxconn to produce their devices in factories in China, Brazil, Mexico, Poland and the Czech Republic.

HTC, Samsung, LG, Motorola, ASUS, Acer, Lenovo and others contract Foxconn to manufacture products for them in the same complex where iPhones are made. Their devices are made by the same over worked, underpaid, underage workers, yet none are mentioned in the Business Insider article. None. Not one. Not even Samsung, the sometimes largest smartphone vendor in the world. Just Apple.

According to Flurry Inc., a software company that tracks usage of apps, the average smartphone owner uses a mobile app -- for example, seeking a restaurant by clicking on the OpenTable Inc. icon on a phone, instead of using a browser to access the website -- 94 minutes a day, compared to 72 minutes accessing websites via a browser. A year ago, time was almost equally split.

“This may be small potatoes now, but increasingly it’s going to be way search gets conducted,” Sena said.